Stephen Gill: Night Procession

€55,00

In March 2014, my family and I moved from east London to rural south Sweden where my partner Lena is from. I understood that these new surroundings would inform my work in very different ways and that nature would play a key role. I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projected impression of the natural landscape we had become part of.

On my many walks, I soon came to realise that this new, apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was in fact teeming with intense life.Small clues appeared during daylight hours that helped me understand the extent of activity during the night.

Envisaging where this activity might unfold, coupled with a hopeful foresight, I placed cameras equipped with motion sensors, to trees, mostly at a low level, so that any movement triggered the camera shutter and an infra-red flash (which was outside the animals’ visual spectrum).

I had grappled for many years with this idea of stepping back as the author of images to give space for chance and to encourage the subject to step forward. I had attempted this in various ways.

This time, though, it felt as if I was stepping out altogether, so that the subjects would orchestrate and perform and take on the role of author while at that moment I was likely to be sleeping. This was nature’s time to speak and let itself be felt and known.

Beschrijving

The photographs in this book have a ceremonial quality about them, as if the animals and the birds present themselves to us one by one – the fox, the hare, the wild boar, the deer, the mouse, the snail, the bird of prey, the fledglings, the owl – as well as something rather solemn, in that we see them the way they are in themselves, in their own world, normally so out of reach from our own. The world we see in these images is a secret world, though no less so when light re- turns to the land, the animals retreat into hiding and the forest again becomes recognisable to us; on the contrary, the mystery seems only to thicken. – Karl Ove Knausgård